Robert didn’t see much of Katie on Tuesday. She had a full day moderating peer group sessions and conducting individual resident evaluations for the women she supervised. But his own feelings about Sanso’s escape had quieted during that time, though Harlan had no optimistic news to offer.
Oddly enough, Robert’s thoughts kept turning to Origins of Fire. He tried and failed several times to make connections between the horrors of that blazing night at the kumpanía and the beauty of fire’s power and the peace that Katie managed to embrace in spite of those conflicting realities.
Wednesday afternoon, he and Katie returned to the Hope House in Robert’s truck after transporting three of the women to their various jobs in Santa Fe.
“How do you do it?” he asked. She sat with her head tipped back easily against the headrest, her eyes closed.
“Do what?”
“Reconcile what happened at the camp to the life you’re living now?”
“You see a disconnection?”
That wasn’t what he’d meant to imply. “The morning after it happened, the morning I realized how much I’d lost, and I thought everyone was dead—my parents, my siblings, you, Janeal—the first thing I wanted was justice. I never stopped wanting justice.”
“That’s all most of us want, Robert. No matter what our situation.”
“You want justice against Salazar Sanso?”
“Of course I do.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that we don’t have it yet?”
Katie took a few seconds to ponder this before saying, “I can’t afford to devote too much time to wanting things I don’t have. I have my life, after all, when logically I shouldn’t have made it through that ordeal at all. They kept saying I shouldn’t be alive—through the dressing changes, the skin grafts, the physical therapy. You hear that often enough and you start to ask God why you are, what it means that it wasn’t your time to go.”
“And he said . . . ?”
She laughed. “It wasn’t like I got a FedEx delivery of stone tablets or a visit from a prophet or anything like that.”
Robert turned left off the highway.
“But over time it became clear that justice wasn’t . . . that I wasn’t the one to . . .” Katie cleared her throat and looked for the right words. “At some point I became more captivated by the miracle of grace than by wondering what God was going to do to Salazar Sanso.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I realized—and maybe it’s because I lost my sight or because I had to rely so much on other people those first few years—that what’s more astounding than justice is mercy. The times when we don’t get the consequences we deserve.”
“Some people get lucky breaks.”
“I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about moments when you know what you deserve, and you agree that you deserve it, and some person or some circumstance comes along and lets you off the hook.”
“Sure. I guess we all run into that now and then. But you’re talking about little stuff, aren’t you? Not Sanso-scale murder.”
“I’m only speaking for myself. I’m not going to claim I’m any better a person than he is.”
This statement shocked Robert. “Nothing you’ve ever done comes close to what Sanso did that night, Katie. I have to side with Lucille on this one. The Katie I grew up with was pretty close to perfect.”
Her mouth formed a half smile and she looked out the window. “What we do . . . who we are . . . I’m not sure we get to measure our relative goodness by comparing it to others’,” she said.
“Where do you get that idea?”
“ ‘Every inclination of the heart is evil from childhood.’ ”
“Sounds like cynical psychobabble.”
“God. Genesis.”
“I still say some people are worse than others. And you’re an angel,” he said. He took his eyes off the road for a second to look at her, then turned back. “You’re a model of peace. I wish I could have some of what you’ve got.”
“You could.”
He shrugged. “Maybe if I hang around you long enough. But after fifteen years of thinking a certain way, I think it would take me some time.”
“Maybe you can. And maybe it will. But if you want to change gears . . .“ She left her invitation open-ended, and he was relieved.
Robert pulled into the Hope House drive and found a place to park in the small guest lot near the main entrance. Robert jumped out and met Katie on her side as she closed the door. Robert stopped her from moving toward the house by placing a hand on her arm.
“I was not teasing you when I called you beautiful,” he said.
Katie dropped her head. “I’m nothing like what I was.”
“You are so much more than what you were, Katie.”
“Robert, if you knew—”
“I do know.” He swept his arm toward the house even though she couldn’t see him do it. “You live for these other women when you could hole yourself up somewhere and wallow in everything you’ve experienced. Somehow—and this is what’s really amazing—you live free of your pain, though I know it must still hurt you. I know because people like us have that ability to recognize the real deal.” Robert leaned against the car.
“It doesn’t fade, does it?” he asked. “The pain doesn’t hurt less as time goes by, you learn to live with it. But you do so much more than that, Katie. So much more than I could dream of. I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to be like you.”
A yellow cab came down the dusty driveway and pulled up to the front porch of the house.
“Robert, I’m not all that you think—”
“You are all that and more,” he said.
He bent and kissed her lightly on the mouth and felt her short gasp of surprise. He cared little if anyone was watching—the person getting out of the cab, maybe Lucille from the office—though he did hope as he pulled away that what he’d done wasn’t a terrible idea that would inflict another wound in either one of them.
He tried to gauge Katie’s reaction.
She was holding her fingers to her temple and looking pained, as if she had a headache coming on. And yet something told him the gesture had nothing to do with him. She shifted and turned in the direction of the cab as if she could see it, as if she recognized the dark-haired, skinny woman exiting the rear door. His eyes followed hers.